Tripping Creatures: How Sheep Get Stoned

It’s not just humans who have a universal drive to find mind-altering substances. HIGH TIMES investigates the animal kingdom for examples of critters who love to trip.

Way, way up in the Canadian Rockies, wild bighorn sheep will do anything to find a rare narcotic lichen that gets them high. According to Ronald K. Siegel, a psycho-pharmacologist who studied the pursuit of altered states of consciousness in both humans and animals in his book Intoxication, bighorns do not usually roam far to forage for their food, yet they will "negotiate narrow ledges, knife-edged outcrops, and dangerous talus slides" to satisfy their craving and get good and stoned.

The sheep scrape the green and yellow lichen off rocky outcroppings with their teeth, sometimes so tenaciously that young sheep will wear their teeth down to the gums. Local Indians thought their wacky behavior after ingesting the trippy fungus meant that the bighorns were sick, but then discovered the lichen to have soporific qualities.

According to Wikipedia, certain species of lichen contain olivetol, a substance that is also found in cannabis and is a precursor in various syntheses of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Maybe that has something to do with our stony sheep friends loving their lichen. Can any biologist out there weigh in?

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